INTRODUCTION
Hey! How you doing, readers? Adam Buxton here. I’m writing this in June 2019 in my office, a room in one of the barns next to the Norfolk farmhouse I live in with my wife (
MY WIFE), my daughter (aged 10), my two sons (aged 14 and 16) and our dog Rosie (a black whippet poodle cross, aged six).
Next to my office is a small voice booth where I edit my podcast, record jingles and do bits of computer work for BUG and my other live shows. The shelves in my office are stacked with selected items of personal and professional detritus. A lot of it has accumulated from the last 23 years of working with Joe Cornish on Adam-and-Joe projects for TV and radio, but in among all that are family photos and souvenirs from my various solo efforts. I’ll list a few of these for you to make myself seem colourful and productive.
Against one wall stands a shelf full of video tapes in various obsolete formats from art school and Adam and Joe Show days. Adjacent to the tape shelves are rows of box files stuffed with scripts, laminates, postcards, sketch books, photographs, etc. Above these sits a selection of hats. The sailor’s cap I wore on The Adam and Joe Show, a bowler hat with a big fake crow on top of it that I wore in a video for my song ‘Nutty Room’, the top hat worn by my character Monty Buggershop Hooty (it’s actually supposed to be pronounced ‘Monty Bershif-Hoy’– aka, Country Man) and a bike helmet sprayed silver with a dowelling pole attached to the front (one of five such helmets worn by the members of Radiohead in a video my friend Garth Jennings and I made in 2007 for their song ‘Jigsaw Falling into Place’).
Above the hats is an Adam Buxton Podcast poster. Hanging alongside this are a few photos of me and Joe from our BBC Radio 6 Music days in the late 2000s, and on the wall behind me is a framed paper plate, left in my dressing room for me after one of my live shows. It has a message written on it from the comedian Harry Hill. The message is personal so I won’t tell you exactly what it says, but I wanted to at least refer to it so you’d be impressed. I’m looking at it now. Such a great message from one of my favourite comedians. I wish you could see it. But it’s personal (and very flattering).
As I write I’m a few days away from my fiftieth birthday, and though I imagine I’m far beyond the mid-point of my life, I think I’m having a mid-life crisis.
I’m not having affairs with models, buying motorbikes and jumping out of aeroplanes, but I am often in a state of self-indulgent, melancholy introspection despite a life of abundant privilege. Does that count?
I think it’s been creeping up on me for a while, but it really took hold when my father, Nigel Buxton (who was known as BaaadDad when he appeared on The Adam and Joe Show), died at the end of 2015. He was a big personality: gruff, pompous, conservative and harshly critical of nearly everything I enjoyed as a youngster and beyond, especially the TV, films and music I have always spent so much time consuming. Perhaps Dad’s critical demeanour contributed to my own frequently unhelpful sensitivity to criticism, not only of my own efforts but those of the people I admire. (Wow, it’s just the introduction and I’m already getting started on the self-analysis and Dad-blaming. This is going well.)
The truth is my dad was more than just a grumpy old reactionary. He was also thoughtful, loving and determined to do the best he could for me, my sister and my brother.
Then he was diagnosed with cancer, and for the last nine months of his life he came to live with us in Norfolk. As you might imagine, it was weird and stirred up a lot of emotional silt that for many years I’d been happy to leave undisturbed. Fucking emotional silt.
A few weeks after my father died, David Bowie checked out, too. People like me, for whom Bowie and his work had been a constant source of pleasure and fascination throughout their lives, were surprised by how upsetting this was. For his fans he represented something vital, otherworldly and, yes, immortal. I think part of me assumed that, instead of dying, Bowie would be beamed into space by well-dressed non-binary aliens or that he would just implode during a live streaming event, leaving a sparkly portal to a dimension filled with challenging electronic music.
But then he goes and gets liver cancer, which any twat could get. Talk about a let-down.
The message from Dad and David Bowie seemed clear: we’re in your DNA and it’s corroding (though I’m not sure that’s scientifically accurate), so now might be a good time to take stock. To celebrate the things that have gone right, to examine the things that have gone wrong, to consider how much of it all you’re passing on to your own children and to put it all in a book mixed in with some tales from my formative years, just a pinch of Dad-blaming and some light name-dropping (did I mention that Harry Hill once wrote me a very flattering message on a paper plate?).
RAMBLE
One of the things I like about the medium of podcasts is that they can easily accommodate the kinds of rambling and tangential conversations that I enjoy having with friends, and I wanted this book to reflect that. ‘But, Buckles,’ you may say, ‘tangential rambles are fine in a podcast, but in a book they’re annoying. Why not just include footnotes, which enable the reader to enjoy tangential information at their leisure rather than interrupting the flow of your sublime prose?’ Well, that’s a good point and thanks for making it, but I like tangential rambles and they appear in the main body of the text because that’s how they appear in my life, constantly interrupting the flow of the central narrative and taking me off on detours and down cul-de-sacs that sometimes make me despair at my inability to concentrate on one thing and see it through to a successful conclusion, but at other times are more interesting than whatever else I should be doing.
A few other notes before we get going. This book jumps about to various points in my life in a way that to some stupid people might appear more or less arbitrary. Clever readers will know instinctively why I have done this and will not need me to explain it here, and as for the stupid readers, don’t worry, you’ll be fine.
I’ve focused on my dad far more heavily than my mum or any other members of my family because, so far, he’s the only one that’s dead, and now he no longer has the power to make Christmas uncomfortable, it feels OK to be indiscreet about him. My wife and children are shadowy presences not because they aren’t an important part of my life but because they are the MOST important part of my life, so I try to be somewhat protective and not use them for material unless there’s a poignant moment or a cheap laugh in it. My wife is a lawyer, so they’ve all signed release forms.
When my dad was the age I am now, a person as silly and ignorant as me – sorry, Dad, as silly and ignorant as I – would not have been considered worthy of having a book published. What can I tell you? We’re living in sick times.
Here we go.